Re: spatial relations and OWL1.1

On 4/27/07 3:38 AM, John Goodwin wrote:
>
>   
>> Hello all,
>> I'm studiing informational science in Hagen, Germany and I'm starting to
>> write a (bachelor)work about querying and (qulitative) reasoning over
>> spatially related informations. During my investigations I've found a.o.
>> the
>> work by Katz, Grau "Representing Qual. Spat. Inf. in OWL DL" (MIND Lab,
>> Univ. of Maryland) showing the possibility to represent the RCC8 calculus
>> in
>> OWL-DL. Does somebody knows, if there exists already an (spatial) ontology
>> in OWL(1.1) which encodes (qualitative) spatial relations (disconnected,
>> overlap, ...)(the RCC8)? In general I'd be interested if anybody is
>> employed
>> with the topic qualitative spatial relations and reasoning in connection
>> with rdf/owl, jena/pellet...to exchange experiences...
>> Thanks a lot and sorry for my english ;o)
>>     
>  
> Hi,
>
> I had thought about encoding as much off RCC8 as possible into OWL1.1, but haven't got round to it yet. OWL1.1 won't be able to express the full semantics of RCC8 though. 
>   
This is not exactly true. If you try to represent RCC8 relations as 
object properties in OWL then you are right. But the paper mentioned in 
the first email (full citation here [1]) shows how a different (and 
non-intuitive) representation is possible using the correspondence 
between Description Logic and Modal Logic S4. You need full concept 
negation, existential and universal restrictions as well as transitivity 
which are all available in OWL-DL. The only additional construct for the 
representation is reflexive properties that weren't in OWL-DL but added 
to OWL 1.1. So everything in RCC8 can be represented in OWL 1.1. As I 
said the representation is not intuitive (a region is represented as a 
concept, the relations between regions as one or more concept axioms, 
etc.) but if you have a tool that does the OWL conversion behind the 
scenes, it wouldn't be too bad (there is no such tool that I'm aware 
of). Also it is not clear how practical it would be to use a DL reasoner 
with this transformation against a realistic RCC8 dataset (I'm not aware 
of such a dataset either :).

Regards,
Evren

[1] Representing Qualitative Spatial Information in OWL-DL. Yarden Katz 
and Bernardo Cuenca Grau. In Proceedings of the OWL: Experiences and 
Directions Workshop. Galway, Ireland, November 2005
http://www.mindswap.org/2005/OWLWorkshop/sub26.pdf
> You might like to check out these papers:
>
> A Tableau Algorithm for Description Logics with Concrete Domains and GCIs - Carsten Lutz and Maja Miličić
> http://www.springerlink.com/content/drmm2yrmwrmrj7a2/
>
> O.Kutz.  E-Connections and Logics of Distance.
> Ph.D. thesis, University of Liverpool.
> http://webcounter.goweb.de/24686LINK-2&http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~okutz/EconnsandDistances.pdf
>
> Check out Michael Wessel's publications http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~mi.wessel/
>
> John
>
> Dr John Goodwin
> Research Scientist
> Research Labs, Ordnance Survey 
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Received on Friday, 27 April 2007 21:14:34 UTC